Well, the Tuesday Book Club has come and gone and it was a little disappointing -- not that Anne Gracie didn't do a brilliant job. How she kept smiling and being gracious to those panelists, who clearly knew nothing about romance books and didn't want to know anything about romance books is beyond me. Only one panelist admitted to ever having read a Mills and Boon and he was eight at the time and it wasn't his cup of tea. All M&Bs were dismissed on the basis of that one experience and on reactions to their covers -- although the discussion of the covers was edited out -- thank goodness.
The program was entitled Sex and Romance, but it was really only about sex and there was an underlying assumption that romance is only about sex, when we all know it encompasses so much more.
So without rattling on for too long, the result was that as far as academics and literary snobs are concerned, Romance in Australia is still a bad smell. Nothing new there...
